Outlaw Country Singer David Allan Coe Dead At 86

The outlaw country star David Allan Coe, a storied figure who leaves a vast and tangled legacy, has died. Coe's wife Kimberly Hastings Coe confirmed his passing to Rolling Stone, though the cause and circumstances of his death have not yet been revealed. Coe was 86, and it's frankly astonishing that he made it that long.

David Allan Coe occupies a fascinating role in the history of country music. He's the outlaw country singer who has the truest claim to "outlaw" status, both because he became famous after spending much of his early life in prison and because he was a member of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Coe was a charismatic, larger-than-life figure with a commanding baritone and a self-deprecating sense of humor, and he had moments of mainstream fame within country music. He was also a deeply disreputable figure who left behind a history of racist, misogynistic, homophobic music, though he always claimed that his underground "X-rated" albums were jokes and that he was never racist.

Coe was born in Akron, and he spent many of his early years in correctional institutions, starting from the age of nine. As a young man, he did time for crimes like armed robbery and car theft. Later on, he claimed that he'd killed inmate and spent time on death row, but there's no evidence that he was telling the truth. In fact, many of the early biographical details in this obituary could be lies or exaggerations. Coe told a lot of stories, and many of those stories were not true.

In the late '60s, Coe moved to Nashville, where he famously lived in a hearse and busked outside the Ryman Auditorium. Coe started out making blues, not country. He released his first two albums, Penitentiary Blues and Requiem For A Harlequin, on the Plantation label in 1970, and he toured with Grand Funk Railroad. Over time, Coe developed a reputation as a country songwriter in Nashville, and the teen star Tanya Tucker had a #1 hit with his song "Would You Lay With Me (In A Field Of Stone)."

Coe signed with Columbia, and he adapted a theatrical persona, wearing rhinestone suits and Lone Ranger masks. His first country album The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy came out in 1974. A year later, Coe had his first top-10 hit with "You Never Even Called Me By My Name," a song written by Steve Goodman and an uncredited John Prine. That track gave Coe the opportunity to do impressions of other country singers and to poke fun at the genre's conventions.

As the outlaw country movement gained steam in Nashville, Coe switched his image up, announcing his new persona on his song "Longhaired Redneck." He became friendly with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, and he sang about those guys, but he also sometimes compared their outlaw status unfavorably with his own. Coe appeared alongside peers like Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle in the 1975 documentary Heartworn Highways, and he wrote "Take This Job And Shove It," a career-defining 1977 hit for Johnny Paycheck. In 1981, he released the original version of "Tennessee Whiskey," which later became a huge hit for both George Jones and Chris Stapleton.

In 1978, Coe released Nothing Sacred, the first of his underground albums. It's full of racist, profane novelty songs, and it wasn't available in stores — only at live shows and through mail-order as advertised in the biker magazine Easyriders. He released a similar record in 1982. (To be fair, Cole also took aim at the anti-gay activist Anita Bryant on one of the songs from those records.) Coe was also the first country singer to use a particularly nasty racial slur on a mainstream country record, and he made heavy use of Confederate imagery for his entire career. On the cover of his 1986 album Son Of The South, for instance, Coe held his infant son Tyler Mahan Coe while wrapping himself in a Confederate flag.

Coe actually had his greatest commercial success in the early '80s, after the outlaw country movement faded away and after he'd already made his underground albums. Coe's 1983 album Castles In The Sand was a top-10 country hit, and he reached #6 on the country chart with "The Ride," a song about meeting the ghost of Hank Williams. His surprisingly slick 1984 song "Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile" went #2, giving him his biggest chart hit as an artist.

Coe's major-label run ended in the late '80s, and he kept releasing music independently through the '90s. He became friendly with the non-Phil Anselmo members of Pantera, and they recorded an album together before Dimebag Darrell's murder. (That LP was called Rebel Meets Rebel, and it came out in 1986.) In the '00s, Coe toured and collaborated with Kid Rock. In 2016, he was sentenced to probation for tax evasion.

In his later years, Coe toured heavily, and his live shows were notoriously sloppy and inconsistent. Coe's son Tyler Mahan Coe started touring with his father as a guitarist when he was 15, and he stayed in his father's band for more than a decade. In 2013, Tyler wrote a blog post about why he was leaving David's band, and it mostly seems that he was just too frustrated about the quality of the live shows. Four years after that, Tyler launched the great country music history podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones, which goes deep into the folklore behind some of country's most fascinating stories. He has never done an episode on his father, but it would be one for the ages.

Below, check out some of David Allan Coe's work.